Michel Hazanavicius and Natalie Portman Eye In the Garden of Beasts

First reported on late last year, Tom Hanks and his producing partner Gary Goetzman have plans to adapt Erik Larson’s non-fiction novel In the Garden of the Beasts for the screen with Hanks playing a leading role. Now, Deadline reports that The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius is in talks to helm with Natalie Portman eyed to play Hanks’ character’s daughter.

The book itself, published last year, is officially described as follows:

With this new book, I invite you to journey to Berlin during Hitlers first year in power, 1933, in the company of a real-life father and daughter from Chicago who suddenly found themselves transported to the heart of the city. They had no conception of the harrowing days that lay ahead. At the time, nothing was certainHitler did not yet possess absolute power, and few outsiders expected his government to survive. The family encountered a city suffused with energy and optimism, with some of the most striking, avant-garde buildings in the world. Its theaters, concert halls, and cafés were jammed; the streets teemed with well-dressed attractive people. But my two protagonists were about to begin an education that would change them forever, with ultimately tragic consequences.

The father was William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered professor who, much to his surprise and everyone elses, was picked by President Roosevelt to be Americas first ambassador to Nazi Germany. His daughter, Martha, was 24 years old, and chose to come along for the adventure, and to escape a dead marriage to a New York banker. They and the rest of their family settled in a grand old house on the citys central park, the Tiergartenin literal translation, the Garden of Beasts.

Dodd expected to encounter the same warm citizenry he had known three decades earlier while a graduate student in Leipzig; he hoped to use reason and quiet persuasion to temper Hitlers government. Martha found the New Germany utterly enthralling, totally unlike the horrific realm depicted in newspapers back home. For her, as for many other foreign visitors at the time, the transformation of Germany was thrilling and not at all frightening. Not yet.

As that first year unfolded they experienced days full of energy, intrigue, and romanceand, ultimately, terror, on a scale they could never have imagined. Their experience tells volumes about why the world took so long to recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler.

Portman, who last appeared on the big screen in Thor, will reprise her role as Jane Foster in next year’s Thor: The Dark World, now in production in the UK.